Developing the Question and Hypothesis

Inquiry question: What are the processes needed for developing a scientific research question and initial hypothesis?

Students:

• conduct an initial literature search, from one or more areas of science, to identify the potential use of a contemporary, relevant publicly available data set
• develop a scientific research question from the literature search
• formulate an initial scientific hypothesis based on the scientific research question
• evaluate the resources associated with the initial scientific hypothesis derived from the literature in terms of:

– the scope to perform an investigation to obtain primary data

– the availability of secondary-sourced data

– the availability of a relevant publicly available data set(s)

– reliability and validity

– assessing the current state of the theory, concept, issue or problem being considered

• assess the process involved in the development of a scientific research question and relevant hypothesis

How and where to begin your research

I would suggest starting by thinking about a few different areas of science that you are interested in , perhaps two or three. Your first job is to work out what is already well-understood in the areas you are interested in, and where the edge of current research is. You should expect this to take some time. You should also record all the progress you make in your logbook, right from the very beginning. Make the notes required to meet the syllabus content above (e.g. make a note on the reliability of a reference when you find it, keep an eye out for publicly available data sets, write up your summary of the current state of the field when you feel confident to do this).

An example investigation - The albedo of the earth and climate change.

Say I am interested in finding out more about the physics of the albedo (reflectance) of the earth in relation to climate change.

The first thing I will do is open my logbook and start writing (see sample logbook below). I record my motivation for the project, the initial information I find when I do some googling (so that I could locate it again, and would know roughly what it is about), as well as my plans for the next step (for example - to read the review article I have found on the albedo of earth). I have also attempted to locate some publicly available data.

Things to look for as you do initial research

When I start my research I am looking for reliable sources that will help me understand what is already known about the topic. Almost always, the best way to do this is to find a recent review article, usually these will be published in specialised journals, e.g. for Physics "Reviews of modern physics" would be an appropriate place to look. For my sample investigation, the review article I found on "The albedo of earth" was published in the journal "Reviews of Geophysics".

Make notes on relevant journal articles as you read them - this will make life a lot easier when you sit down to write your literature review - you can base this on what you have already written in your logbook.

You will know you have done enough work for this section when you can write a referenced overview of the current understanding in the field, a few paragraphs in length. This doesn't have to be your final polished literature review. What you eventually write in your background/literature review section of your final report will probably be somewhat different to this (as your understanding will have evolved by the time you are writing your final report) but it should mean you are ready to start the process of deciding what your research question is. Be aware the process that you are going through tends to be circular - you will revisit your literature review and your research question and methodology as you get your initial results for your investigation and find that you need to revise your research directions.

What makes a source 'reliable'?

I would be looking for journal articles which:

• Are published in a high ranking journal (usually ranked according to how many citations articles in that journal have. See discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_ranking)
• Have a large number of citations (depending on how old the article is) - meaning that other researchers refer to this paper in their own research articles. The number of citations is a measure of how highly regarded the work is by other researchers in the field.
• Whose authors are from well-regarded universities/institutions (but this is not really as important as the first two)
• There may also be circumstances in which reliable information is available on a website is maintained by a reputable institution such as NASA (for example, in my sample investigation, the NASA earth observatory),

Using citations to locate other relevant journal articles

When you find a highly reliable and relevant article, look at both the articles it cites as well as articles which cite that article to find other highly relevant articles.

You can find the articles that cite your article using, for example, google scholar. When I search for my review article on "the albedo of earth" by Stehpens et al. on google scholar I can see that it has been cited by 30 other articles. I click on the "citing literature" link to find those articles. In this way you 'follow your nose' through the research until you find the information you want and/or come up against the edge of what is known, with articles published in the last year or two.

How to find more full-text articles

You can consider using the browser add-on "Unpaywall" which finds legal fulltext versions of articles (often stored in university repositories of their researchers work or in preprint archives). If you are having trouble finding a full-text version of an article you can also sometimes find the researchers own personal webpage which may list full-text versions (for example I keep full-text versions of my articles available on my personal website) as it is in the researcher's interests that their articles be accessible.

As mentioned on the the "tools" page, joining the state and national libraries may also assist you find full-text papers.